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November 27, 2012

[The two of them went to speak to a brothel madam and moved into
the brothel, where Padma lived for a year. She eventually got her own apartment
and commuted to work and earned far more than she had in factories. For years,
she knew nothing about condoms and sexually transmitted diseases, she said. But
a nongovernmental organization eventually contacted her and taught her about
the dangers of unprotected sex, she said.]

Technology is a powerful tool
that is increasingly being used to connect buyers and sellers far more
efficiently and cutting out all sorts of middlemen, including retail merchants,
newspaper ad sellers and, now, even brothel madams.

It is difficult to mourn the decline of brothels,
which have been the source of countless tragedies over many centuries. Indeed,
if there is a locus of human trafficking in Asia, it is the historic red-light
districts in its greatest cities.

But brothels have also served to concentrate in a
few locations the greatest source of H.I.V. infections in Asia. Now that
cellphones are destroying brothels, however, sex work has become far more
scattered. That, in turn, may endanger India's success at keeping sex work from
feeding the AIDS epidemic, as
I reported recently in The New York Times.

In my reporting, I spoke to many women in the
industry. Here are two of their tales:

She came to Mumbai to look for work when she was 15 years old in
hopes of getting a job that would support her six brothers and sisters back in
Karnataka State, and her striking beauty - she has extraordinary hazel eyes -
eventually led her to sex work.

"I first started working in an incense factory here,"
said Padma, which is her work name, not her real one. "And then I went to
work in a gas lamp factory."

But the work was hard and the pay low, and she found that she
was often unable to send money home. Then she ran into a friend from her
village.

"And she basically said, 'Why don't we get into sex
work?'" Padma recalled. "We would be able to send money back to the
village every month."

The two of them went to speak to a brothel madam and moved into
the brothel, where Padma lived for a year. She eventually got her own apartment
and commuted to work and earned far more than she had in factories. For years,
she knew nothing about condoms and sexually transmitted diseases, she said. But
a nongovernmental organization eventually contacted her and taught her about
the dangers of unprotected sex, she said.

She still works in brothels, but business has declined
significantly there, she said. So now she contacts clients directly and often meets
them in hotels.

Julie came to Mumbai with an older woman from her village. The
older woman sold her to a brothel madam for 45,000 rupees, or about $800.

"I didn't understand at all what was going to happen to
me," said Julie, which is her work name, not her real one. "I didn't
even know what sex work was."

Her first months in the brothel were a nightmare, she said. The
madam beat her.

"After that, I kind of got used to it, and some of the
clients were pretty nice," Julie said. "They would strike up friendships
with me."

After seven months, Julie fell in love with one of her clients,
and the two married. They had a wonderful life together, but her husband soon
fell ill.

"So then I started working again at the brothel," she
said.

But the advent of cellphones had changed brothel life, she said.

"Earlier, when we were in the brothels, we never understood
the business transaction and how much money the guys spent," Julie said.
"Now we have that under our control. We basically do the transaction. Now,
I earn the money, I keep the money and if the madam needs rent for the room,
she gets that."

[The
students who protested Monday were from the Chabcha Sorig Lobling School,
according to Free Tibet. They gathered at 5:40 a.m. and marched peacefully into
the town of Chabcha. Chinese security forces began a violent crackdown at 9
a.m., the report said. “It’s still unclear what happened next, but many young
students were so badly injured they were taken straight to hospital,” Free
Tibet said. Security forces locked down the town, the group added. Radio Free
Tibet reported that security forces fired tear gas and beat students with rifle
butts, arresting four. ]

BEIJING
— At least five Tibetans have set fire to themselves in recent days to protest
Chinese rule in Tibetan regions, while at least five Tibetan students were in critical condition and 15 others were
being treated for injuries after security forces cracked down on a large
protest in western China on Monday, according
to reports by Radio Free Asia and Free Tibet, an advocacy group.

The
protest took place in an area of Qinghai Province that the Chinese call Hainan
Autonomous Prefecture, and that Tibetans call Tsolho. More than 1,000 Tibetans,
mostly students and teachers, took to the streets to demand equal rights for
ethnic minorities and the freedom to study and use the Tibetan language.
Several reports said the protest began after local officials distributed a
booklet that condemned Tibetans who had self-immolated and that belittled the
Tibetan language.

With
the five recent self-immolations, at least 22 Tibetans have set fire to
themselves this month alone, and 86 since 2009, according to Radio Free Asia.
The first case was a monk from Kirti Monastery, which became the heart of the self-immolations last year and
earlier this year, though the acts have since become more widespread and now
constitute one of the largest such phenomena anywhere in the world in recent
memory. The latest four cases were reported Sunday and Monday in the western
China provinces of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai, which all have significant
Tibetan populations.

The
students who protested Monday were from the Chabcha Sorig Lobling School,
according to Free Tibet. They gathered at 5:40 a.m. and marched peacefully into
the town of Chabcha. Chinese security forces began a violent crackdown at 9
a.m., the report said. “It’s still unclear what happened next, but many young
students were so badly injured they were taken straight to hospital,” Free
Tibet said. Security forces locked down the town, the group added. Radio Free
Tibet reported that security forces fired tear gas and beat students with rifle
butts, arresting four.

The
events could not be independently confirmed; Chinese officials have barred
foreign journalists from traveling to the sites of protests or self-immolations
by Tibetans. Phone calls made Tuesday to offices of the prefecture government
and party committee went unanswered. A woman answering a call on the prefecture
emergency hot line said she had not heard of any protests.

Radio
Free Asia, which is financed by the United States government, said the school
in Chabcha, known as Gonghe in Chinese, trained students in medicine. The
booklet that inspired the protests was called “Ten Real Views of Tsolho Area,”
and the medical students burned all the copies given to them and “called for
equality among nationalities and freedom to study the Tibetan language,”
according to a person who was quoted anonymously by Radio Free Asia.

Moves
by officials in Qinghai to restrict the use of the Tibetan language,
particularly in classrooms, have resulted in protests by students before. The
northeast Tibetan region that Qinghai encompasses, generally called Amdo, is
historically an area known for Tibetan scholarship and the production of
cultural works. Even today, poets, writers and singers in Qinghai create works
in the Tibetan language that are distributed widely across the Tibetan world.